They Left Public Radio to Try Their Fortunes on the Blockchain

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Manoush Zomorodi, left, and Jen Poyant left WNYC this year to create a podcast, “ZigZag,” in partnership with the blockchain journalism company Civil Media.CreditCreditHeather Sten for The New York Times

By Jaclyn Peiser

Sept. 16, 2018

Manoush Zomorodi’s eyes used to glaze over when she heard someone bring up blockchain. Now she talks about it all the time as the host of “ZigZag,” a podcast that will go into its second season next month.

Ms. Zomorodi, the former host of the WNYC technology podcast “Note to Self,” created “ZigZag” with Jen Poyant, who was the executive producer of the WNYC show. It is the first of what the two hope will be many podcasts from the production house they formed this year in partnership with Civil Media, a new company built on blockchain technology.

“ZigZag” chronicles their journey as they try to understand blockchain technology and its possible implications for journalism. And because they are living the very topic they are reporting on, the podcast is also about what it means to be working mothers who are trying to make a go of it as entrepreneurs as they stake their financial and professional stability on Civil’s success.

Through the first 12-episode season, which concluded last month, Ms. Zomorodi became an expert in explaining the much-hyped but still arcane digital ledger to lay listeners.

“If I, as a tech journalist, roll my eyes when I hear about blockchain, somebody is not doing a good job explaining this stuff,” she said. “That’s where the opportunity is — for two women, two moms, who are going out on their own, who have to understand blockchain. There’s your entryway to a podcast.”

They named the podcast “ZigZag” because they knew it would wend its digressive way from blockchain to entrepreneurship to their personal lives and back again.

“We zigzag around, but all these issues are intertwined,” Ms. Poyant said, “and if you are patient enough to stick with us through the narrative of the first season, you will start to realize how intertwined they are.”

Ms. Zomorodi, 45, and Ms. Poyant, 39, left WNYC in April, months after the station, owned by New York Public Radio, had cut ties with its longtime hosts John Hockenberry, Leonard Lopate and Jonathan Schwartz. The men departed after multiple station employees accused them of harassment.

By the spring, the two women said, they had reached the end of their time at WNYC. They liked the idea of owning their own work — and the #MeToo accusations that swirled through the station caused them to see their former workplace in a new light.

“Rebecca Traister wrote this beautiful line in her New York magazine article at the time, which was like, you look down and suddenly we can see all the scaffolding that we’re standing on,” Ms. Zomorodi said. “And it really felt like that for me.”

Civil, a New York start-up that now aims to help start 100 new journalism outlets by the end of the year, gave Ms. Zomorodi and Ms. Poyant grant money that came partly in the form of dollars and partly in the company’s own cryptocurrency, CVL tokens, which will go on sale on Tuesday.

Ms. Zomorodi and Ms. Poyant, who worked together for almost three years before starting the new venture, described themselves as creative soul mates.

“We can kind of read each other’s minds,” Ms. Poyant said.

Ms. Poyant is a single mother with a 7-year-old son; Ms. Zomorodi has two children, 11 and 8, and is married to Josh Robin, a political reporter for NY1. The podcast doesn’t shy away from going into how hard it is to be a working parent.

“All of our kids are struggling a little bit right now, with the amount of work time that we are taking for ourselves, often in front of them,” Ms. Poyant said in Episode 3. “There’s a level of guilt that you feel when you’re sitting on a computer and the kids are like, ‘Mom, Mom, Mom,’ and you’re like, ‘I told you I had to work. Go away.’ There’s definitely a sense of like, ‘Is this kid going to, like, remember this as neglect one day?’”

Ms. Zomorodi often records segments for the podcast on the fly. During a trip to upstate New York, she sat with a blanket over her head to record herself while her children were jumping on a trampoline.

“It’s a juggle, and it’s exhausting,” she said.

Ms. Zomorodi got serious about explaining blockchain in the second episode of “ZigZag,” and she did it with the help of a “Schoolhouse Rock”-style jingle sung by the musician and podcaster Martin Zaltz Austwick.

Between the host’s quick descriptions of the technology’s three basic principles, Mr. Austwick strummed a guitar and sang:

Bitcoin is blockchain’s babyTransactions, trading, taking care of business on the blockchainAll my friends are computers and we’re working together on the blockchain

While the ditty made the digital ledger sound almost cute, Civil, with its reliance on cryptocurrency, is not without risks. And because their podcast documents the entry of Ms. Zomorodi and Ms. Poyant into the blockchain world, they often end up reporting on the company that is their main partner.

“It’s super weird, in that it’s a situation that I’ve never been in before,” Ms. Zomorodi said.

Matthew Iles, the chief executive of Civil, said he didn’t mind having Ms. Zomorodi and Ms. Poyant report on the company.

“We’re a start-up figuring a lot of stuff out day to day,” he said. “But we’re also a company that’s founded on transparency and openness, and we want to demonstrate that we trust our partners and that we are open to scrutiny and that we are committed to editorial independence.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: They Left Public Radio To Try Their Fortunes With the Blockchain. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe